I made a similar post around this time last year... I went to NightFest again. It's the annual flower festival, except I went at night with trippy lights and stuff. The place was rather crowded, and it was quite dark so I couldn't really see where I was going. Everything was vastly overpriced- a bottle of water cost $5 and even the tickets had gone up in price. Still, I didn't really care and spent money anyway.
I didn't really WANT to go this year, because I have lingering bad memories from last year. I guess I have more artistic appreciation nowadays, and I think looking at flowers with glowing lights in the dark is kind of romantic... if I had someone to go with. Basically one of my girl-friends organised this thing in the first place, and the she stated that she was gonna bring her bf along and that if other people wanted to bring their partners it was all cool and fine. At that point I realised it was going to become a "wander off with your date" kind of event, and at that point I didn't really want to go any more. However I hadn't seen my friends in a long time so I came up with a compromise: I called up a friend of mine and hoped he would keep me company when everyone else has wandered off in their little corner.
Anyway when I thought everything had been said and done all my friends cancelled on the event and said they couldn't go for whatever reason. Then I have my one friend who I invited telling me he was already in town (2 hours before I could feasibly get there) and I was like "oh wow this is so awkward. At that stage I pretty much had zero incentive to go but I had dragged my friend into going so if I bailed on him it would be AwkwardFest for him. That being decided, I drove out after dinner and then waited in line for an hour because I didn't buy tickets beforehand this year.
I finally got inside after the longest time, and to my dismay I realized that the one friend who I had invited wasn't actually alone--- but it wasn't like he was just with a couple of other people--- he was part of a massive, massive group of people who I really didn't know, and they were his classmates or acquaintances or whatever the fuck. At that stage I realized "oh wow, I really didn't need to be here".
Except I'm becoming the kind of person who stops sulking in a corner when they're in an unhappy situation. Having figured out that selfishness is the ingredient to happiness, I told my friend I didn't really want to hang out with the big group and we broke off the group with 2 closer, mutual friends of ours. We made a 4 man roaming squad, and from then on I had a really good time. We went through this patch of trees which had green lights pouring down- I can't really describe it well, but you could see rays of green light in front of you, and it felt like you were in Mission Impossible. That was possibly the coolest part of the entire exhibition. I bought some overpriced ice cream, then we walked around these stalls- I tried some watermelon-flavoured fudge (it actually tastes like watermelon) and it was the sweetest thing ever.
After that we peer-pressured each other into wasting more money on buying furry animal hats. There were these wolf-hats and I was like "let's make a wolf pack!" but then it turned out there were only 3 hats and 4 of us. So I drew the short end of the stick and chose something else, and this guy was trying to be nice and asked "are you sure you don't want the wolf" about 50 times. I was kinda moved because I did want the wolf but he was like 2 years younger than me and I feel guilty when people younger than I am are nice to me. So then I grabbed a different hat instead of the 4-man wolf-gang we had a 3-wolf 1-stand-out-tiger-squad. That would've looked awks in day time but it was night so nobody saw, and in the end it was just 4 of us prowling around with furry animal hats. We were fucking adorable.
Yeah I ended up having a good time in the end. I think life just gets a lot easier when you're not thinking about confessing to someone or panicking on the inside. Of course walking around brought back a lot of memories of last year--- and I kinda still remember where everything happened... but it just felt so much more comfortable being around someone you like but not trying super-hard to impress or to grab their attention.
Life is easier when you can be yourself.
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